“Mother is not an old maid,” said his
virgin sister with pinched lips.

He felt like shouting back: “Yes, she
is, and so are the van der Luydens, and so we all
are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by
the wing-tip of Reality.” But he saw her
long gentle face puckering into tears, and felt ashamed
of the useless pain he was inflicting.

“Hang Countess Olenska! Don’t be
a goose, Janey—­ I’m not her keeper.”

“No; but you did ask the Wellands to announce
your engagement sooner so that we might all back her
up; and if it hadn’t been for that cousin Louisa
would never have invited her to the dinner for the
Duke.”

“Well—­what harm was there in inviting
her? She was the best-looking woman in the room;
she made the dinner a little less funereal than the
usual van der Luyden banquet.”

“You know cousin Henry asked her to please you:
he persuaded cousin Louisa. And now they’re
so upset that they’re going back to Skuytercliff
tomorrow. I think, Newland, you’d better
come down. You don’t seem to understand
how mother feels.”

In the drawing-room Newland found his mother.
She raised a troubled brow from her needlework to
ask: “Has Janey told you?”

“Yes.” He tried to keep his tone
as measured as her own. “But I can’t
take it very seriously.”

“Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa
and cousin Henry?”

“The fact that they can be offended by such
a trifle as Countess Olenska’s going to the
house of a woman they consider common.”

“Consider—!”

“Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses
people on Sunday evenings, when the whole of New York
is dying of inanition.”

“Good music? All I know is, there was
a woman who got up on a table and sang the things
they sing at the places you go to in Paris.
There was smoking and champagne.”

“Well—­that kind of thing happens
in other places, and the world still goes on.”

“I don’t suppose, dear, you’re really
defending the French Sunday?”

“I’ve heard you often enough, mother,
grumble at the English Sunday when we’ve been
in London.”

“New York is neither Paris nor London.”

“Oh, no, it’s not!” her son groaned.

“You mean, I suppose, that society here is not
as brilliant? You’re right, I daresay;
but we belong here, and people should respect our
ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska
especially: she came back to get away from the
kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.”

Newland made no answer, and after a moment his mother
ventured: “I was going to put on my bonnet
and ask you to take me to see cousin Louisa for a
moment before dinner.” He frowned, and
she continued: “I thought you might explain
to her what you’ve just said: that society
abroad is different . . . that people are not as particular,
and that Madame Olenska may not have realised how
we feel about such things. It would be, you
know, dear,” she added with an innocent adroitness,
“in Madame Olenska’s interest if you did.”